The Brat PAC

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Our civilization has persisted with the majority of adults operating at the emotional-intellectual level of bratty 13-year-olds for a long time — and even managed to not only survive them but enjoy advances despite them.

That’s getting harder to do, and the dishonor roll is too long for this space. Suffice it to say, its ranks are choked with self-aggrandizing religious zealots and deluded thugs whose shared operating principles are unashamed hypocrisy, gaslighting and viciousness in the service of grifting to power.

It’s happening all over, including — and increasingly so — in little old Bonner County, as the recently endured Republican primary election made plain. 

This is the second such election cycle to involve huge fundraising and spending levels for Legislative District 1. In 2024, Scott Herndon and Jim Woodward hauled in more than $117,000 and $174,000, and this time around (their fourth primary matchup) the campaigns were fueled by war chests totaling about $104,000 and $120,000, respectively.

It speaks to the amount of ads, including in this publication; mailers; push texts; and robocalls that went out to district residents. That’s to be expected, but the amounts are historically, hugely disproportionate to the office, reflective of the intensity of the interparty politics at play and would have been unprecedented numbers for a legislative race in previous years. 

We’re talking about a “citizen legislature” that meets for about three and a half months each year in a building whose columns are fake marble in a city that thinks it’s Little Austin while being the most remote metropolitan area in the Lower 48 states.

But, obviously, there are much larger forces and interests behind it all. Basically, one side is the local manifestation of a nationwide theo-authoritarian con job that is trying its damndest to frog march us into what historian Timothy Synder is calling “superpower suicide.” The other side is a style of Republicanism that in any other, saner, time would be the default Idaho position — indeed, those candidates attracted endorsements from everyone from the sitting governor to the state police and fire associations to every other traditional institutional political power in the state.

The outcome of the election is covered elsewhere, but of interest here is the maniacal opposition to the latter “normal” Republicans rooted in the stupidity-industrial complex, which we might as well call the merger of social media and artificial intelligence.

Venture if you must into the slimy, AI-sloppy slums of local Facebook groups and you’ll see the mask fall from what considers itself the area’s political community. It’s more like the Brat PAC, which somehow manages to be both half-baked and overheated. It would be funny, in a sad way, if it wasn’t at least a little true. If District 1 has a political id it’s on Facebook, and it needs to talk to a professional. (For example, I read one post from a self-identified Christian conservative guy who recently moved here, and he was so confused about where to direct his vitriol that he had to ask one of the local forums. I couldn’t tell if it helped, since his plea attracted hundreds of responses that spiraled into their own down-thread battles.)

Overall, the amount of innuendo, lies, bad-faith argumentation, doxxing, false piety and general rat-bastardism that spumed from that toxic, frequently anonymous assemblage of trolls would have been enough to make John Adams beg Thomas Jefferson to drown him in a Parisian cesspit. Perhaps, more charitably, a German word can encapsulate the appropriate reaction to so much try-hard, pick-me political dogfighting: fremdschämen — that is, the feeling of deep embarrassment on another’s behalf when they’re being a total lackwit.

And it is embarrassing how such a solid percentage of “political refugees” to North Idaho peacock online while turning our local elections into a cross between Mean Girls, Election and CPAC, with all the maturity that implies. It’s a suffering that so many people who came here ostensibly to live unruffled lives can’t resist their self-indulgent impulse to afflict us with the loud and irresponsible style of politics that gets their amygdalas humming at the expense of everyone else. Now that the primary is over, hopefully the little brats will take a long nap and leave us in peace.